Of the Sand
by 1helios1
Summary: The tale of two men on the greatest frontier in the galaxy....


A brief piece of fiction set on Pandora.

By Terence Hollister (I probably have no writing skill what so ever!)

Hank sits at the table, he alternates sipping his drink and looking up at the other patrons of the shabby bar. They are a chatty bunch and, judging by the tense barman, hank figures this is abnormal. You can always get a good feel for the vibe of a town by spending some time in its drinking establishments. This place is probably pretty mellow, but right now something is clearly up. Of course Hank already knows what's up, it's the only reason he is in the bar. Right now Hank is in filter mode, listening to the conversations, and picking out the facts from all the bullshit, exaggeration, and rumor. This is something any veteran merc would have learned to do. The idea being, that the anything you can't find out before you go out and do a job is valuable, and could be the difference between success and death, so Hank listens, Hank listens very carefully.

The door to the bar opens, and a tall lean man walks in. from the expressions of the patrons, and from the sand caking the man's clothes, Hank figures the man just got into town. The man is wearing a utilitarian tan jump suit covered in pockets, and over that a faded blue poncho, which just barely fails to conceal the rifle on the man's back. As he sits down on a barstool Hank gets a better look at the gun. It's an unusual piece of work. From the style Hank would guess it's an old earth weapon, making it at least three hundred years old, but none of its components are more than fifty. Like a living thing, none of its parts original, but it is somehow still ancient.

Hank gets up, and moves to the stool next to that of the stranger, sits down and extends his hand.

"Hi, I'm Hank, what's your name stranger?

"Brashick" he replies in a rough voice, _been out in the desert a while, needs to drink more water, _Hank figures.

"Nice to meet you Brashick, I have to say, that's a nice gun you've got there" he says gesturing to the rifle on Brashick back.

"You wouldn't say that if you knew how bad she preformed, barely even good for show" _that, _Hanks thinks, _is a terrible lie. _He doesn't expect any less of Brashick. Its instinct for nomads, mercs, and crazies alike to downplay their skills and weapons, because when something goes down, you want them looking anywhere but at you, bandits and law men alike will kill you without a second thought if they see you as a threat, but hank has been around, on both sides of it too, and he knows that he very well may be sitting next to thebiggest badass motherfucker on all Pandora. "What brings you here?" Hank asks "looking for work?"

"Yeah, isn't everybody?"

"Yes, but some won't find it because some of them don't have guns strapped to their back"

Brashick looks up "oh" he says "you mean that kind of work, I don't know a lot about that kind of work"

"Well, I happen to have heard of a job, see these towns folk" he gestures to the other patrons "they recently ran into some bandits making camp nearby, and apparently these bandits kidnapped some of these good townsfolk's women, and you can imagine how bad that is for the general moral around here."

"How's the pay" asks Brashick, clearly interested now

"Mayors offering 50K to anybody who can bring em back safe."

"25K each" replies Brashick

"clever man, I would go after it myself, except I gather there are a fair many of them, and then you just happen in with your fancy rifle, looking like you could use some money "

Brashick makes to look as though he is thinking it over, but Hank knows he has already made up is mind

He looks up after a few moments "I'm in"

Five miles and two and a quarter hours later they are lying down on the top of a ridge, looking out over a small bandit camp, Hank peers through binoculars, while Brashick uses his rifle scope. While the rifle itself is a fairly old design, that of a Gewehr 43 as Brashick told him, the scope is a sleek sophisticated piece of technology. On either end is what appears to be an ordinary lens, the tub gracefully narrows toward the center where it is covered in knobs dials and switches, and can likely adjust for everything from elevation and windage, to abnormal gravity effects (AGE's) and spectral reception, and Hank has no doubt that with it Brashick could have counted the bandits in the camp a few miles back up the hill if he had wanted to.

The camp is no more than five hundred meters away now, and from their vantage point, they can see most everything, while remaining well concealed. The camp consists of four circular huts surrounding a fire with eight bandits around it. The bandits are marked by their distinctive masks, respirators from back when they were convicts used as slave labor in the mines. The masks serve little purpose now, but perhaps when you have seen firsthand what happens to a man after he breathes the air in some of the mines it can be hard to willingly take away that protection.

Brashick lowers his rifle, and looks over at Hank "any reason not to just turn back?" he asks, referring to that fact that a quick look at the fire in the center of the camp revealed the charred bodies of at least three people, almost certainly the women they were here to recover.

Hank mulls it over for a moment, "moral obligation"

Brashick nods, "good enough for me. Bandit on the far right" Hank picks up his binoculars and centers them on the right most bandit in time to see blood burst from a freshly made hole between the man's shoulder blades, he slumps over and the rest jump up, look around wildly while trying to find cover. It's easy for Hank to see that none of them have a clue where he and Brashick are. Some of the bandits remain exposed, and Brashick, exploiting their confusion, fires twice more. The remaining five, with Brashick's position given away by the continued shooting, scramble to get behind their huts.

"What now?" asks Hank

"Well, as I see it we have two options. One, we go down there, coming around that rock to the right, and get em at close range, or.." but Hank cuts him off "that sounds good enough, let's do that" Brashick nods, and Hank readies his own weapon, a short black sub machine gun, with a double drum magazine. The climb down the ridge, and quietly make their way to a large boulder, between them and the bandits. Hank prepares to come around the right side of the boulder, pauses, and asks "Brash, what was option two?"

Brashick looks surprised, perhaps to the question, or perhaps to the nickname, and responds "well, you see I have this setting here" he gestures to the rifle scope "and with it on I could see through the fabric walls of the hut, and just, shoot em through it."

Hanks looks stunned "well, why didn't you say so up there?"

"You cut me off, and you looked so eager, I couldn't bring myself to spoil that"

Hank grins, and laughs "fine, but next time, maybe you tell me the safer plan first, ja?"

"You think there is going to be a next time?" Brashick replies, but the smile on his face tells Hank he doesn't mind the idea of another hand

"We will work out the details later, now, it's my turn" and with that hank runs five feet out turns, and aims at the bandits huddled near the huts. The smg spits fire, and Brashick thinks, it must have put fifty rounds down range, into bodies, huts, fire, sand and all. Brashick reckons that with a weapon that fires that much, that fast, accuracy could actually be a detriment to its performance. As if to agree with him a moment later, all but one of the bandits are dead. The lucky bastard managed to get cover in the huts, and Brashick realizes Hank does not know where he is. Brashick flips a small switch and the world through his rifle scope goes to oranges, reds and blacks, and he can see, as bright as anything, the bandit crouched in the third hut. He pulls the trigger, and watches as the orange yellow blob of the bandits head seems to expand violently, and then fade as he collapses.

They know with the women dead there is no hope of getting paid for the job, and so they turn to looting as their only means of payment. They strip three of the huts of everything, and use some of the materials to build a makeshift sled, onto which the pile anything of value, they replenish what ammo they can, and finally place the bodies of the dead in the fourth hut. They each take turns, one pulling the sled, and the other covering their tracks.

"We will have two of your cheapest" Brashick says to the barman while hank sits down at a table, and counts out the money made from selling the loot. The bar is even chattier than before, what with the news that the town menace has been eradicate, but as Brashick observes _on Pandora, one menace dies and another usually takes its place._ Brashick listens awhile, trying to get a feel for whether then townsfolk see it the way he does, but, he realizes, _if they expected trouble, people like me and Hank might be out of the job._

"Three hundred and fifty, that's not so bad"

"Each?" asks Brashick. Now sitting at the table, drink in hand

"One seventy five then" Hank replies

"Not exactly what I was expecting when you told me about the job this morning"

"Come on, you knew as well as I did that they might not be alive to be rescued, that's just the way it is here, but we made some money, and did some good, the way I see it? That's about the most you can really hope for in a day"

Brashick thinks for a moment "you are right of course, still, I was just kinda hoping it might have gone the other way"

He smiles, a thin smile, and looks down into his drink. _Water, the cheapest they had. _Even with the recent water shortages alcoholic beverages will always be more expensive, because they are imported. Years earlier, back when the corporations still had a real presence on Pandora, some enterprising men attempted to make alcohol using native plants, while these attempts were not, strictly speaking, successful they did spawn a semi-lucrative trade in Pandorin made poisons. This sparked some of the philosophy inclined to claim that Pandora was the most lethal world in all the galaxy, and that the only thing Pandora produced, and indeed exported, was death. In fact the only truly harmless thing the organisms of Pandora have ever been responsible for is its earth like atmosphere, which is currently cleaner than that of earth itself_, _though with no real regulation, it is unlikely to stay that way, in the mean time though you can breathe in deep the sweet air before being consumed where you stand by flocks of rakk. At this last thought Brashick grins to himself, and return from his reverie.

"You know" he says "I think that even if I had enough money to go anywhere, I wouldn't, I would stay right here on Pandora"

Hank smiles "that, my friend, is because you, like me, are a man who craves adventure. Pandora is… the greatest frontier in the galaxy, and everything you or I have ever seen of it, all that stuff, that's all just the borderlands"


End file.
